The Folk Of The Air

by Peter S. Beagle

  “Hey, you are just fantastic,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. You are just a fantastic musician.” She punched his arm clumsily.

  Farrell bowed without answering. Her nose was as bony as that of a much older woman; her mouth was flat and muscular, her pointed chin as abrupt as an elbow, and the tanned skin bore faint swirls and granulations of acne. But her eyes were green and blue and gray, with the pupil shading imperceptibly into the iris, so that looking into them was like lying on his back, watching clouds in the late afternoon. The lids were arched and full in the center, narrowing quickly to the corners, giving her eyes the shape of tapestry diamonds or spearheads.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. “Are you a professional? I mean, do you play somewhere? On, this is my friend Nick Bonner.” She paid no attention at all to Julie.

  Farrell had never seen anyone as beautiful as Nicholas Bonner. The nearest thing to it was his memory of a battered stone head in a New York gallery—a fist-sized fragment, supposedly a North Indian image of Alexander the Great, with a face that smiled straight into Farrell’s skull, as Nicholas did now. The statue’s complexion had been scarred and smudgy, while Nicholas Bonner’s skin was as perfect as water, and its clump of chipped gray curls would have looked like fossilized mange beside the boy’s absurdly glorious golden crest; but he might have modeled for the fullness of the high cheeks, the mouth’s drowsy suggestion of a lift at one corner, and the entire air of soft knowing, so sensuous as to be almost sexless. But the stone eyes were the more human. Nicholas Bonner’s eyes were the color of champagne, the color of lightning, and to meet them was to look through a summer window into the ravenous old nothing of a black hole. Farrell thought with an odd unexpected sympathy, Oh, he probably never could do anything about the eyes. Nicholas Bonner said, in his light, happy, courteous young voice, “I have great joy of our meeting, good my lord.”

  Does he know that I saw him? Farrell’s heart was hiccuping painfully, and he could not make himself look into Nicholas Bonner’s eyes again. “I am a poor thumping tunester, no more,” he answered Aiffe, “playing everywhere for a night, and nowhere for two.” Nicholas Bonner smiled at the moon, continuing to sway from foot to foot, never quite letting go of the pavane. Well, if I hadn’t danced in as long as I guess he hasn’t danced. He squeezed Julie’s hand gently and winked at her.

  Aiffe’s teeth were thin and sharp, fish teeth. She made a prim face, lowering her glance and murmuring in the League talk over joined hands, “Sir troubadour, I am called Aiffe of Scotland, Aiffe of the North, and this night my soul is given altogether to dancing. Tell me now truly who you are, and what estate you claim in your own country, and then, of your kindness, come and partner me a little while. I am Aiffe.”

  “My lady, there is a geas,” he began but she interrupted him swiftly. “Nay, what are such tinpot forbiddances to Aiffe? Be assured, you will come to no harm in revealing your name to me, but only great good.” And she ran the tip of her pale tongue deliberately over her slightly chapped lips.

  Julie’s hand tightened on Farrell’s, and he remembered, not only her fierce warning, “Names mean something here,” but Hamid the Saracen saying, “You don’t even let the gods know your right name.” On a strange small impulse, he replied carefully, “Alas, the spell was cast by the mighty wizard-emperor Prester John himself, and who shall defy such a ban? I pray you therefore, ask me no more, or I may well yield to your grace, and I would not have you mourn that you called my doom upon me.” In alley and playground football, his specialty had always been broken-field running.

  If the name of Prester John provoked any reaction, he did not know how to read it. Nicholas Bonner laughed outright—if you heard that sound enough times, some damn thing would break, maybe not your heart, but something—while Aiffe blushed in patches like poison oak. The Lady Criseyde began tapping her drum lightly, and Aiffe took hold of Farrell’s free hand. “Well, we can dance anyway,” she said. Her hand felt hard and sticky—long fingers bunched around a tiny hot palm. She said, “They will play the Earl of March’s Galliard next. Do you know the turns?”

  Farrell said, “I think so.” Beside him Nicholas Bonner was bowing to Julie, offering his arm. She accepted him calmly, showing no fear and not looking back at Farrell as Aiffe pulled him away. Nicholas Bonner did, though, and the angelic mouth twitched once, like the tail-tip of a hunting cat.

  Dancing with Aiffe was neither a sinister experience nor a particularly exciting one. She was a deft and meticulous dancer, executing her ruades, her springing cadences, her fleurets, and her high-kicking greves without a flaw or a variation, easily matching her steps to Farrell’s less practiced ones. But her brief interest in him seemed to have lapsed completely: she did not speak or smile, and if she did anything further with her tongue, it must have happened while he was trying to watch Nicholas Bonner with Julie, envying, even as it terrified him, the climate of devouring happiness that accompanied the yellow-haired boy. He said to Aiffe, “Speaking of Prester John. He asks to be remembered.”

  She blinked vaguely at him—a long-jawed adolescent, plain as an adult, almost embarrassing in her stark lack of the menace and mystery for which she was prepared to badger hell. It was only during the last strain of the galliard that she spun violently away from him into a jagged, blazing scurry of half-steps that carried her as far as the dais—himself three floundering beats behind her—then wheeling back to end with a high jump like a cry of rage, and a reverence so dazzlingly scornful that Farrell stood flat-footed, feeling as if every woman he had ever known, beginning with his mother, were laughing at him in the curve of her arm.

  The music ended, but no one ever bowed to thank the musicians for that playing of the Earl of March’s Galliard, for Aiffe shook her dust-colored hair and cried out, “Now is the geas fulfilled, and now are you free to speak your name to me. For I am a king’s daughter and a maiden, and behold, we have danced a galliard together.” The pupils of her eyes had gone oval, and there was a faint, pulsing corona of yellow-green around each one.

  In the clearing, the bright voices were guttering and going out, two and three at a time. The dancers stared and murmured and sidled closer, most moving heavily now in tunics veined with sweat and gowns too damp to rustle. Farrell looked for Julie, but Nicholas Bonner hid her from him. Aiffe flung one arm wide, without turning, and Garth de Montfaucon prowled to her side, left hand on his sword hilt, right hand fretting with a wilting end of his pince-nez mustache. Farrell said, “Sweet Jesus in the underbrush. He’s your father?”

  “Aye, indeed,” Aiffe answered clearly. “King Garth that was and will be, first ruler of Huy Braseal and still the longest-reigning.” Farrell liked her just then, for the pride in her voice. He gazed around among the dancers, wondering numbly who her mother might be. Maybe the kid’s a changeling. Maybe he is. Why didn’t Julie tell me?

  “My daughter is a princess of many realms,” Garth de Montfaucon said quietly, “whether I am king or no.” Aiffe put her arm through his, and they stood like that, smiling the same long, supple smile at Farrell. It made him think of Briseis’ habit of laying her head alongside Sia’s head, so that they could look at everything together.

  “Now we will have your name.” She spoke with the toneless cheer of a clubwoman at a reception filling out gummed lapel tags. Farrell was certain that he could challenge her on a technicality—Garth’s grandchildren will be terrific with animals and metal futures—and knew equally well that he had neither the courage nor the meanness for it. Turning, he saw Nicholas Bonner looking on, all golden wonder, and he felt a sudden deep vertigo teasing him to let go of his real name, announcing loudly as he fell, “It’s Joseph Malachi Lope de Vega Farrell, Rosanna, you want to make something of it?” Names don’t get stolen, for God’s sake, credit cards get stolen. Why should I play by their rules?

  But Julie was pushing past Nicholas Bonner and through the dancers, shaking her head at him as urgently as if his temptation were flashing above
him in a bubbly comic-strip thought balloon. Gaping and swaying next to a bemused King Bohemond, Crof Grant hummed Will Ye No‘ Come Back Again? in his nose. A trickle of sweat fluttered down Farrell’s side, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory leaned forward a little.

  “Come, fair knight,” Aiffe said, “your name.” She hugged her father’s arm, shivering with delight, looking like a puppy grinning around a stick it has no intention of retrieving. She held out her free hand to Farrell, palm up, wriggling the long, rag-nailed fingers.

  There were no names in his head. Later that was to disquiet him as much as anything else; that he—junk-man of the lost, curator of the truly useless, random cherisher, keeper, keener—should come to bay without so much as a third string Round Tabler or journeyman superman out of Italian romances at his call. Aiffe widened her strange eyes, attempting or burlesquing seductiveness, and Farrell found that he could not look away from her. The effort made him dizzy and short of breath, almost sick. He felt Nicholas Bonner’s smile trailing across his shoulders, burning where it clung. Aiffe said three soft words that Farrell had never heard before. The sickness moved, spilling thickly through him like some spoiled wisdom that he knew he could not bear. She said the words again, and then a third time, and Farrell began to tell her his name, so she would stop.

  Close at hand, a man was singing, or rather declaiming in a high-pitched rhythmic drone that sounded like stones and shells rasping back down a beach with the ebb tide. Farrell had no idea how long the man had been doing this.

  “With a host of furious fancies,

  Whereof I am commander;

  With a burning spear and a horse of air,

  In the wilderness I wander…“

  Aiffe looked up, and Farrell, released, stumbled a step forward, turned his head and saw Hamid ibn Shanfara. The Saracen’s voice had again played its trick with distance; he was standing alone on a hummock of bare earth near the pavilion, with his shoulders back and his hands tucked into the sash of his white robe. He nodded very slightly to Farrell, touching a forefinger airily to the indigo turban, which was coming loose again.

  Farrell laughed, feeling as though his throat were full of old straw. With the laughter came the next lines of the lonesome, gentle, possessed madman’s song. He said to Aiffe, “My geas is still upon me. I may speak my name to no other hearing than yours.”

  She lowered her eyes to his again, but no power clenched on him this time, and he could tell that she knew it. She did not move until he whispered mockingly, “Come on, Rosanna, be a sport.” Then she came toward him, and he half expected to see the ground rise in small surges under her feet, as the surface of the mountain lake had done when the storm came pacing across it.

  When she was very near, he said the name, holding it out between them like holy water or a kitchen chair. “I am the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.” Muscles crawled in Aiffe’s temples, as though she were trying to lay her ears flat back; her lips all but disappeared. Farrell bowed to her.

  Nicholas Bonner was hugging himself rapturously, bouncing on his tiptoes, mouth wide open, tongue floating and preening between strong bluish-white teeth. Farrell looked down and saw that the clover bracelet on his wrist—Julie’s forgotten favor—had turned brown and crisp and was a breath away from falling to sharp crumbles. It scratched his skin faintly as he raised his arm to study it. From the look of it, he might have been holding it near a fire.

  Chapter 10

  Ben did not come home that night, nor the day and night after. Sia gave three unrelated explanations for his absence. On the third night, Farrell cooked dinner, and they ate in a tightrope silence in which Farrell’s thoughts ticked and clanged and grated as noisily as his Aunt Dolores’ insides had bombilated all through innumerable family gatherings. No one was ever allowed to take the slightest notice, even during a volley over a soldier’s grave or Tournament Night at the bowling alley; which always meant the death of conversation before dessert, spluttering smaller cousins being hustled out of the dining room, and his mother reciting recipes in forlorn counterpoint to Aunt Dolores’ salute to visiting royalty. Now in turn he heard himself chattering helplessly about garlic soup or his work at the zoo, trying to drown out the bowling-alley racket of his mind, while Sia watched him from far across the table, stolid as a sidewalk. She ate and drank whatever he set before her, as if that were her job.

  After dinner, she built a fire, hunkering flat-footed to riffle through kindling like a cardsharp, turning the heavy madroña half-logs daintily around each other until they fitted, all but clicking into a perfect snowflake matrix. She snapped a single match at the pile and sat back with a soft little grunt as the flames exploded upward like arterial blood. Without turning, she said, “It is quite possible to die of unasked questions. Why do you never ask me what you want to know?”

  Taken off-guard—they had been torpidly discussing the Avicenna City Council’s recent motion to prohibit the local sale of war toys, grain-fed beef, and all dolls without genitals—he replied immediately, “How come you never go out of the house?” He had not realized that he was even aware of it.

  “What kind of a question is that?” She sounded mildly surprised and amused. “What makes you think I don’t go out?”

  Farrell said, “Your clients come to you. Ben and I do all the shopping. You don’t go anywhere with Ben—not to dinner, not to a party, a movie, a concert, not since I’ve been here. I haven’t once seen you get the mail.”

  “But when do you ever see me, Joe? What do you think you see me doing?” Her voice remained oddly playful, almost arch. “All you can be sure of, with your schedule, is that I am someone who eats breakfast, receives strange people at strange hours, and likes to listen to your music in the evenings. For all you know, I might spend my afternoons preaching hell and repentance at a bus stop. I might be working with a gang of shoplifters, confidence tricksters. I might have half a dozen lovers or a paper route. You wouldn’t know.” Farrell laughed grudgingly, and Sia said, “Ask me a real question.”

  “Where the hell is Ben?” Sia did not seem to have heard, but continued to squat with her back to him. Farrell said, “Sia, forty-eight hours is just too long for a departmental meeting, but it does make him a missing person. I think we ought to call the cops.”

  “No,” she said to the fire. “No, we call no one.” She was hugging herself, rubbing her shoulders as if she could not get warm. A song prickled across Farrell’s mind: Last night I saw the new moon, with the old moon in her arms. He said, “When I saw him in Barton Park, he didn’t recognize me. I didn’t tell you that part.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Farrell heard the calmness as condescension and found that he was suddenly, carelessly furious. “Of course I didn’t have to,” he mimicked her. “Nothing ever comes as a surprise to Madame LaZonga. The cosmos is wired to that bay window in the kitchen, the gods check in with you twice a week, your rocking chair is shrouded in eternal veils of goddamn mystery. Me, I really don’t want to know all that stuff, whether the universe runs on premium or unleaded. I’m just a bit anxious about my friend, that’s all.”

  She was laughing before he had finished, a rough, generous whoop that set the fire tumbling and giggling itself. Realizing that she was trying to rise, he placed his hand under her elbow, letting her lever herself upright against him. The weight on his arm was so much greater than he had expected that he almost toppled over her, momentarily filled with the terror of drowning. The feeling vanished as soon as she was on her feet, and Sia gave no sign that she had noticed his clumsiness, or his fear.

  “Ben was right, how nice,” she said. “It takes serious work to get you angry, but it’s very rewarding.” She gripped his upper arms, not laughing now. “In the first place, I see nothing from that window or that chair but what anyone else might see. That is the exact truth—and bloody annoying it is too, I can tell you. As for mysteries, visitations—” And here she drew her mouth impossibly down until she looked like Winston Churchill burlesquing the Ma
sk of Tragedy. “—I regret, the gods have not dropped me so much as a postcard in a long time. Perhaps they lost my forwarding address.” She gave him a gentle shake, grinning with her small white teeth, turning her face as though to bring every scored slackness into the cruelest light for him, like a beaten wolf exposing its throat to trigger automatic mercy. She said, “I am an old woman with a young lover and I don’t know where he is. That is all the story, Joe. I told you that the first morning we met.”

  Standing this close, she smelled of the bitter coffee that she drank continually, and more faintly of the fire-smoke in her hair and the musky madroña slickness on her hands. Farrell asked, “How long has he been doing it? Running around in the woods, playing he’s Egil Eyvindsson sacking monasteries.”

  The mocking, wholehearted smile bent like a broken leg. “If you mean the League, he has only been with them for a year or so, going to their little wars, fighting in their tournaments.” Her tone was flat and dismissive whenever she spoke of the League. “But Egil is another matter. Egil is much older than all that.” Abruptly she let go of him and stepped away, stumbling over Briseis dozing under the chess table. Briseis uttered the scream she had been saving for an earthquake, scuttled to Farrell, sat on his foot, and went back to sleep. Sia never took her eyes off Farrell.

  “And Egil is real,” she said softly and clearly. Farrell felt his stomach chill with the familiar apprehension of unpleasant knowledge bearing down on him. Sia said, “Ben—our Ben—would have known you. Egil Eyvindsson doesn’t know anyone in this world.”